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Booklist Review

Selected Poems.

Berrigan, Ted (author).

Though he rhymes only by accident, couldn’t manage a metric form if he tried (he did, in a bunch of “sonnets” that have to be charitably regarded as variants of the form), and hasn’t a smidgen of conventional idealism, Berrigan (1934–83) is corny as bronzed baby shoes about the bohemian lifestyle he led as one of the bunch of 1960s New York poets and artists often called the second New York school. As Alice Notley (Berrigan’s second wife) explains in her introduction, “Everything we did or said became part of [his poetry] . . . Ted famously believed that being a poet was a 24-hour-a-day job—you did it in your sleep too.” That attitude seems as romantic as those of uplifting old newspaper versifiers like Edgar Guest and Berton Braley, whose best-of collection Virtues in Verse arrives simultaneously with Berrigan’s selected. Berrigan’s prosy ramblings about “Things to Do in New York (City)” or “Things to Do in Anne’s Room” and his dependence for musicality upon the lyrics of 1960s folk-rock songs can seem, however, pretty thin gruel next to the newspaper poets’ jingle-jangling.